Hi gang! So, the holiday season is upcoming but in the mean time we're all usually pretty much tied up with school and work activities which give us less time to play on our favorite server. Which also means that you might want to spend your time as efficient as possible. One very often encountered problem is working on your residence: will it really be worth the effort and blocks to make that building you're thinking of? "If only we could go into creative to try things out..", many people sometimes think. So why not try and put this to the test? As such I stepped up to Simon, we talked some about builds and such and while admiring his new fisherman I asked if he'd be so kind to give me creative mode. Yes, well, uhm... The next moment Simon looked at me with a strange expression, thunder struck me a few times and before I knew I was set on fire! So yeah.. asking Senior Staff for access to creative mode is probably not the best of ideas here There is, however, a good alternative: Make your own Creative Town World Ever since Minecraft 1.8 was released Mojang has given us quite a few interesting new commands which we can use to pull this off without any mods. So... First start by creating a new world and give it a good name. Set the game mode to creative and then click "More World Options..." (at the bottom). Then make sure that cheats are allowed, set the world type to Superflat and then click Customize. Like this: Click the Customize button... The default flat world consists of 1 layer of grass, 2 layers of dirt and finally one layer of bedrock. So in this world the top is y4. In our town world on EMC however we all got a pretty large amount of dirt to work with using y64. Therefor we need to change the preset. Click on the Presets button (lower right corner) and then change the 2 before the dirt specification into 62 (so add a 6), like so: Now click Use Preset, and you should see in the overview that we're now using 62 layers of dirt. Click Done, and you'll be back in the first shown picture. So now click "Create world" and you'll soon be looking at your own superflat grass world: Our new town world, notice how we're at y64 now? Some preparations... First of all you should probably set the difficulty to peaceful in order to prevent hostile mobs from spawning. The moment when it becomes dark then you'll get pestered with them. Obviously they won't attack you because you're in creative, but they can still be a nuisance when you're building stuff. So use: /difficulty 0. The next step is optional, but if you don't like having to cope with things going dark every time then you can turn this off too. Just use: /gamerule doDaylightCycle false. I personally like it if the time of day is set to noon (so the sun is right up in the sky), and you can make that happen by using: /time set 7000. Some things you need to know... If you look at the picture above you'll notice that the standard crosshair has been replaced by a 3-way colorful "trihair": Red, Green and Blue ("RGB"). And those colors weren't chosen by random... In 3D modeling software these three colors are always used to help you get a good idea of the direction you're looking at and where you can move certain objects to. I know, I know: pictures or it didn't happen, right? So I'll ask my virtual assistant Riley to show you guys: I selected the hoverboard and you can clearly see the RGB indicators... So remember: RGB = XYZ. The colors will show you in which direction you're looking at. By merely looking at the "trihair" in the (Minecraft) picture above I can easily determine that I'm looking in the direction of a negative Z because the blue line is facing towards me. I can also see that the positive X is to my right (because the red line points to the right) which automatically means that the negative X is to my left. This might seem very abstract and useless right now but trust me: you need to know this. The next important thing is the ~ character. In a Minecraft command ~ basically represents your current position in the world. Better yet: Minecraft also allows you to use this to specify "dynamic" coordinates by using the ~ position as a start and then adding or subtracting from it. For example: lets say I wanted to teleport myself 5 blocks into the air (Y axis). I could check my current position from looking at F3 and then using something like: /tp 190 69 52 and off I'd go. But I can also use these 'dynamic' coordinates: /tp ~ ~5 ~. This basically tells Minecraft to teleport myself to the same X coordinate I'm on, the same Y coordinate + 5 blocks and the same Z coordinate. Effectively teleporting myself 5 blocks into the air. And this is much easier on me than having to look at F3 all the time... Creating the roads... Now that we know what to look out for in our town world its time to create the roads. As you probably know the roads on EMC are made from sandstone. And Minecraft has this really useful command to help us out: /fill. All it takes is to specify 2 coordinates on the map and a block type. After that everything in between will be filled with that same block. So... First I'll determine a starting point, this will be the corner of the residence I'm creating. I've placed a red block of wool to help me get started, next I'll use the /fill command, like so: So what does this command do? First of all we need to look carefully at the marker: We're facing a positive X area, and the area to our right is facing a positive Z. We also know that a residence on EMC is 60 x 60, and that a standard road next to it is 4 blocks wide. So my goal is to create a road which is 4 blocks wide (so 3 more blocks to the right) and slightly longer than 60 blocks so it passes my residence. But there's something else to consider... On EMC we're not allowed to edit the road areas so the roads basically consist of one layer of sandstone. In our own world however this doesn't work: we can edit everything we want. So how can we easily determine which area is part of our residence and what area is part of the road? Well, my solution is to make the roads completely solid. So filling them with sandstone all the way down to bedrock. This will make sure that you can tell that you're next to the road every time you see sandstone appear while digging. So... Let's dive into that /fill command I used: /fill ~-20 1 ~ ~80 ~-1 ~3 sandstone. As I told you before the /fill command requires 2 coordinates. And a coordinate in Minecraft consists of 3 values: X, Y and Z. So, the starting X coordinate is -20 blocks from my current X position. And because I am facing a positive X area the start is 20 blocks behind me. The Y (height) value is 1. This means the first block above the bedrock layer. And finally the Z position (left/right) is where I'm currently standing. So: the start is 20 blocks behind me and 63 blocks below me. The end coordinate is comparable: my current X position plus 80. And because I'm facing a positive X area this means that the end is somewhere in front of me. The Y position is my current position minus 1. So the height of the block(s) I'm standing on. And finally my current Z position plus 3. And because the positive Z area is to my right this means that the road will end 3 blocks to my right. This makes sure that the road will become 4 blocks wide in total (the start coordinate was my current Z position atfer all). So the end is 80 blocks in front of me, one block below me and 3 blocks to my right. And finally I specify the block type to use which is sandstone. The road is fully filled, this helps me recognize it even if I'm deep below the surface... So now that we have our first road it's time to teleport to the opposite corner of our soon to be ready residence: This should be familiar to you by now. While standing on the red block of wool I'm telling Minecraft to teleport me 60 blocks ahead. Because I'm facing a positive X area all I need to specify is X+60, as you can see above. What I then do is replace the block under me with another block of red wool, then turn left so that I keep the residence to my left while looking in the direction where the road should be and finally move one block to the right so that the wool block is to my left (I don't want to be standing on the residence itself because I'm making the road below me). End of part I
It's all about coordinates... The main thing to look out for is your current (relative) position, which areas you're facing and what you want to build. So in this new location I'd be facing a negative Z area (I turned left after all) and to my right is a positive X area. So we can basically copy the command I used above while changing the relevant parts. Instead of using the Z axis to 'widen' the road I'd now be using the X axis, and where I was using the X axis for the length of the road I'll now be using the Z axis: /fill ~ 1 ~20 ~3 ~-1 ~-80 sandstone. So: the start point will be 20 blocks behind me, and because I'm facing a negative Z area this means that I need to add 20 to my current Z position. Next it will also be 63 below me but that detail doesn't change. The end point will be 80 blocks in front of me. So: 80 blocks minus my current Z position. And because the positive X area is to my right the road needs to end 3 blocks added to my current X position. Eventually you should end up with something like this... And don't worry if you make a mistake sometimes. As you can see in the picture above that happens to all of us from time to time. The quickest way to fix a mistake is to repeat the same command on the same position you were standing and replace sandstone with dirt. Eventually the grass should grow back anyway... So what about double roads? Finally, I thought you'd never ask Yes, sometimes your residence can be next to a double road. Basically a double road consists of 2 standard roads with a 5 block wide area in between. This area is also split up in the middle, but I'll let you figure that part out for yourselves To make a double road all you have to do is start by making a standard road in the way I showed you above. Then move 5 blocks to the side (I like using another type of wool to help me recognize the coordinates) and use the same command to create another standard road: One more example then? If you look closely at the indicator you'll see that I'm facing a negative X area (the red line points towards me). And to my right is a negative Z area. So, to make something which starts 20 blocks behind me I'd need to specify a coordinate of X plus 20. To make the road 80 blocks long in front of me I'd need to specify X minus 80. And finally to make the road 4 blocks wide I'd need to specify a location 3 blocks to my right, which means my current Z position minus 3. The result is something like this: And there you have it... A quick guide on how to quickly make your own town world so you can experiment while using creative mode without bothering the senior staff
You lost me at "creative". I read the whole guide and found it quite informative, all though I may never use it as I don't like minecraft in creative form, but you never know. I am sure that many players will find this very useful and I think this is a well written guide. In my opinion the best part was when you were on fire. p.s. Keep up the good work Shel.
